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Teaching has increasingly become more difficult with time and student success is falling at an alarming rate.

Based on research, below are listed 7 of the most common challenges faced by teachers today:

Inspiring students to be more self-directed

Teachers are having a tough time getting students to be more self-directed. They are looking for a way to ease the pressure of students by keeping them interested and making sure that lesson practices and the homework delivered is fun, accessible anywhere, targeted to improve their weaknesses and ensuring that learning takes place in a more conducive, less-tense, less-pressured environment.

Improving Learning Outcomes

Designing Learning Outcomes that mean something and are an effective way to measure student potential and success is a big challenge. Meeting those learning outcomes and having solid indicators to prove this, all the while easing the paperwork and the excel sheets of the teachers have become unthinkable. Even if these are done well, teachers still don’t get that 360° view of how good their students are as a whole. In addition, finding the right way to automate this process in such a way that real time results are what’s needed is of prime importance.

Differentiating and personalizing teaching

What works for one student, does not work for another. Teachers have recognized this but have very few ways to test and make sure that different skill levels are being evaluated. A new wave of assessments and how teaching is conducted is important. Newer question types, media-enhanced exams and the like are what teachers are looking for; diversifying teaching and keeping it simple at the same time is a balance that is hard to find.

Getting students to do their work outside the classroom

What students do at schools is just a fraction of the effort that needs to be put in for academic success. With this in mind, teachers have the extra added pressure of having students put in the extra effort outside of the classroom. Students still have found no proper incentive to deal with this issue. Teachers are looking for a way that they can encourage students to learn while they’re having fun and not make it seem like pursuing knowledge is a tedious task.

Finding the time to keep up with administrative tasks

It takes a lot of time and work to come up with curriculum, teach, be engaged with classrooms, come up with questions for assessments, spend time(and sometimes weekends) correcting and grading these assessments, and then having to spend hours filling out reports, analysis, strengths, weaknesses and other performance indicators. Teachers are looking for ways to be eased of this burden so that they can focus on teaching and promoting the importance of education and learning.

Understanding Changing Technology

With the advance of the internet and changing technology, teachers have been finding it hard to find easy yet effective systems and platforms to run their classrooms.

Parental Involvement

Having the parents of students informed and involved is one major area that teachers and admins are having a hard time to keep up with. Teachers are looking for an easy way to have parents be a part of their child’s journey and have a good understanding of their skills and monitoring their performances on a regular basis.

We at SwiftAssess understand these issues. SwiftAssess was developed by educators, for educators. Designed to be a 360°, 24/7 all-round assessment platform for student performances, SwiftAssess gives teachers the best options for authoring, delivering and tracking assessments.

With over 20 Question Types to test skills in any field, in depth analytics at the click of a button, automated grading, structured program organization and multi-platform delivery, SwiftAssess gives you everything you need to smoothly and efficiently run your classroom tests.

In education, summative assessments are used to measure and evaluate student learning, test skill levels and grade academic achievement after defined periods of instruction and teaching. These tests, assessments, exams, projects, assignments or other types of assessments are a key metric to resolve whether students have learned what was taught during said period. The achievement of summative assessments are represented as scores or grades. Standardized tests (like SATs, ACT’s etc.) and advanced placement tests are used to ensure that merit is equal and that the students are on par with academic standards.

How is this done?

Summative assessments are created in common formats like Multiple Choice, True/False, Matching, Essay, Short Answer Questions, Fill In the Blanks and the like.

Frequency of testing:

Typically, these are conducted at the end of a unit, module, course, week, semester, term, program, project or year. The periodic nature of summative assessments is used to measure the student achievement at a point in time for reporting and accountability and to maximize learning through formalized standard tests. With this process, we come to the question

How effective is this method?

Summative assessments have been in place for a long time and they are the key indicator of any student’s achievement, rank, score and success. Schools, universities and even large enterprises use these to test the capabilities of examinees. Is this all that you need to tell how good a student is?

Are They Enough?

As good and as time tested as summative assessments are, there seems to be missing something with this mode of assessments. With summative assessments, students are much less likely to be creative and experimental with ideas and concepts. A formalized structure means that they will prefer to play it safe and not allow their thinking to go beyond the scope of the questions that they have to answer in order to get the grades that they desire. From an assessor’s point of view, whether a teacher, professor or a trainer, you have to think that 5 exams over the course of 5 months are not enough to perceive a student’s actual knowledge and skill level. It will get the basic understanding across and how the student performs on the test will show how prepared they were for that test.

But, a big gap in the learning process is lost in the actual understanding of the student. Will this student be able to apply the presented knowledge on the test in real life? Will the student be able to build, create and re-imagine the scope of knowledge? It seems unlikely that these can be answered by tests and exams once every month or more. What needs to happen is an ongoing progression of knowledge.

The questions being asked shouldn’t be “How good is my student at writing a ‘for loop’?” The question should be along the lines of “How will my student use a ‘for loop’ to engineer a solution through it? What we need is data and actionable data at that. We need formative, summative, diagnostic assessments and everything in between. We need constant analytics that can show us where exactly a student needs work and where their strengths and weaknesses lie, where their efforts can be focused and where their skills and creativity can be encouraged.

We believe that SwiftAssess can answer all these questions.

How?

SwiftAssess was developed and built by educators and teachers at GamaLearn. It is an assessment authoring, delivery, and management platform. All the elements including 24/7 real time analytics, 360° view of student performances, continuous feedback and improvement and skill specific questions make this the ultimate assessment tool. This brings all the dimensions of student performance to the attention of the assessors with strengths, weaknesses and all metrics to truly assess students’ knowledge and skills.

Welcome to the SwiftAssess blog! SwiftAssess is an assessment authoring, delivery and performance tracking platform system by GamaLearn. We aim to redefine traditional assessment techniques, by utilizing latest scalable and cutting edge web & mobile technologies to ensure your assessment strategy is the most efficient and quickest it can be. Our goal is to fill the gap and add innovation to the continuous assessment process, through question banks and delivery channels. SwiftAssess‘ sophisticated analytics tools give in-depth insights to your results and what you should be more focused on fixing and modifying in your overall assessment strategy.

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